A WWII living history group seeking to recreate the average, day-to-day, mundane experiences of the common German second-line security soldier. Visit our web site at www.festung.net. E-mail: intrenches1945@gmail.com

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Public "battles" in living history

Sicherungs-Regiment 195 focuses mostly on immersion events, where we try
to recreate the daily mundane life of WWII German security troops. We
also attend living history events where we interact with the public.
Although we are not educators, we try to share what we have learned with
people interested in the time period. Participating in living history
events allows other history enthusiasts to see and handle the equipment
we use, and we try to craft interactions that have some educational
value. For instance, a recreated field office can lead to a discussion
about the importance of bureaucracy in a totalitarian regime. Further,
as Sicherung troops, our under-equipped, stripped-down approach often
serves as a stark counterpoint to other more sprawling displays which
may offer plenty of "eye candy," but little sense of how field soldiers
of the era actually lived.

Public battles, though, are a
different story. Simply put, our unit does not participate in them.
Ever. We will not perform mock battles as part of any "edutainment"
scheme. It is our view that public battles can never be realistic, and
that they do history a disservice by presenting a sanitized and
glorified caricature of combat. Promoters who claim that the public can
see what WWII looked like, by watching a public battle, are simply being
dishonest. Spectators, who walk away from these spectacles believing
that they have seen something realistic, have unfortunately been misled.
WWII combat was not something that was suited for spectators, and can
not be adapted for “edutainment” without an overwhelming vast compromise
that destroys any attempt at historical integrity. The result is, at
best, a clumsy cartoon; at worst, public battles put a glorious shine on
mass violence and loss of life of an enormous scale. If a realistic depiction of a WWII battle could be created, any spectators would probably run away screaming, and certainly would not be offering up applause at the battle’s end. Individual
members of our unit may have different personal views, and may choose to
participate in public battles, with other units for their own reasons.
But Sicherungs-Regiment 195 has chosen not to support public battles as a
unit. Our policy is to focus on more productive, positive, realistic
and educational efforts when interacting with spectators.